


Interlude B: A World of One Color

by tsukara



Category: Bleach
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-12 02:35:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsukara/pseuds/tsukara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between the goodbye and the leaving. Rukia has some loose ends to tie up in Karakura before she goes (what she thinks will be) for good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interlude B: A World of One Color

She didn't leave Karakura right away. She had one more day. One last span of twenty-four hours to spend in a town that felt like foreign ground again. Tie up loose ends, encourage the proper representative to do his job, make sure things were settled--that was the official line. 

They all knew, and no one said a word to Ichigo. Too painful for him to know that she was still there, but that he couldn't see her anymore, her true self lost to him and only him. He was normal now, just like he always said he wanted, but they could still see the pain in his eyes (not quite regret, not when he'd saved the world for this) when he lost sight of her.

Rukia was no longer reflected in his eyes. She waited respectfully until Ichigo had bowed his head from the empty sky, thanked the others for waiting around for him, but that he was still pretty tired, so... It was a polite dismissal. He would be better in the morning, they all knew, or at least better able to pretend he was. They gathered again in the street, where Rukia waited, still visible to them, for all that they numbered one less now. "Do you have to go right away, Kuchiki-san?" Orihime had asked, breaking the silence (not mourning, the beginning of a valediction--it felt too similar for her). 

Looking back up from the pavement, Rukia smiled meaninglessly. "Not right this second. I have a day to do anything else that I need to here."

All three understood what she meant. All three decided not to tell Ichigo unless he asked, and perhaps even then... Hopefully he never would. If he didn't bring it up first, either he wanted to forget, or couldn't handle the reminder, not just yet. Best to leave it be.

No one knew what to really say. Orihime chattered something about how nice it was to be able to do so, to have that time, Ishida added some murmured agreement, Chad stayed his enigmatic self. "If I'm to be doing things, I had best get to them."

This too was a goodbye, and still a bittersweet one ("I don't know when I can come back, no." "I hope it's soon, we can have tea or something"; the meaningless things you say to heal a wound, the myriad tiny, well-meaning lies). But at least they could still see her when she finally left that spot of pavement and flash-stepped into the air.

And tie up loose ends she did. Settling her account at Urahara's, though there was still, he felt, a debt he owed her for getting her mixed up in all of this, so he waved her off (repeated the wish that she come back and visit, knowing its barb). Her inept replacement (Kurumadani, that was the name--she could only ever remember the image of a car) was a bit harder to find, but she managed it, gave him her best Kuchiki glare, informed him that he was to be more responsible with this post in the future, the admonishment only relayed by her, coming from the captain originally. It was, after all, an important post.

Then there was her job to do, for one last time. No one knew why more Hollows showed up at night. After all, they couldn't be seen during the day either, by normal humans. Rukia now thought it was perhaps something about the night being a familiar reminder of Hueco Mundo, echoing right down to the essence of what a Hollow was, even if the new-minted Hollow had never actually been there. It was a working theory, anyway. One that didn't much matter when she was busy making pretty clean slices in the whites of their masks instead of thinking about leaving, come morning.

Yet still, somehow, she ended up outside his house. Unconscious routine from so many nights spent patrolling from and returning to this place, she supposed. Old habits, even if she had only really had them for a few month's time. Here she was again, standing on the pavement in the monochromatic streetlight, drowning out the moonlight, looking up at his window. "What am I doing?" she asked herself softly, closing her eyes and shaking her head.

"Saying goodbye," a voice startled her out of her self-reciminations. "Again."

Rukia stared at the tall man, leaning against the gate. She wasn't used to Ichigo's father being so level. But then, there were a lot of things she would never have guessed the man capable of once. Since the day they had brought Ichigo home (the sleeping hero) he had been the person she was used to, jovial and joking around his daughters. But she knew more than that, had glimpsed it in the serious face when he had carried his son back home, laid his daughters in their beds, safe and sound. "Urahara-san told me. About Ichigo's training," she stared back at him. 

The light fell around her, drained the color of everything, like hard, strange ice, while Isshin stood just outside it, obscured by the enveloping shadows. She shifted slightly, waiting for his answer, feeling the dirt grind beneath her waraji. There were so many things she wanted to ask him, interrogate until she could wring the answers out of this arcane man--no, shinigami. "You are a shinigami," she stated. It wasn't even worth asking. 

"I guess so," was the enigmatic reply. Rukia narrowed her eyes further, trying to make out anything but a neutral expression, a seemingly-languid pose. "Again."

The stare translated into a brief frown. "Again?"

Isshin sighed, came walking into the light hands in his pockets. "It's a long story, but it's not important now." She opened her mouth to protest, to insist that no, of course it was important, wasn't it? How could he say such a thing and then leave it at that? But he tilted up his head and leveled that look at her, that serious one that so unnerved her. "You don't have much time left here, do you?"

Resisting the urge to let out a huff of frustration, Rukia nodded. "Tomorrow, mid-day."

Isshin checked his watch. "More like today," he murmured.

"I suppose."

The sombre silence only lasted a moment longer, until Ichigo's father broke out in one of those stupid, slightly mad grins he'd so perfected--to the point she hadn't even know it was a mask, and she had supposed herself an expert at those. "Don't look so down, you can just bet I won't be giving up on my third daughter so easily!"

Rukia hoped she could glare him into submission. It wasn't working. "I'll see you again soon, Rukia-chan!" He informed her jovially, before turning on his heel and walking back toward the dark house. 

"Wait!" She called, still holding on to the notion of trying to get answers out of him, here and now.

He stopped just outside the circle of the streetlight. "Not now." The conviviality was gone from his voice, leaving him sounding like a worn-out man whose son had finished a war he didn't start. "When it's the right time, I'll talk. This isn't it, we'd only clumsily trample all over everything. Soon. For now... there are things you have to do, aren't there?"

Rukia swallowed, belatedly recognizing her own words echoed back to her. "Yes, I suppose I do."

Isshin nodded, walked on. "Goodnight, Kuchiki Rukia." Rukia was left with the click of the door and the persistent drone of the streetlight. 

There was something she needed to do. She held her breath (though she didn't need to) as she stepped up onto empty air, through the wall, expecting at any moment a foot in the back, a shout that he could see her and what was she doing here, what kind of robber did she think she was anyway--

She opened her eyes to the dimly-lit room, the only light from the moon, the streetlight not immediate at this angle. Everything just as still as she should have expected. Rukia sighed, looking down at the still form of the human (just a normal human) lying there in the bed, just like he'd been for the last month or so. One whole month and she hadn't figured out how to let this go.

Sighing again, she shook her head at the sleeping boy, quietly pushing open the closet. She hadn't left many traces of her presence anyway, really, but the few things she had she tucked away. It wasn't much, a drawing or two, some markers. A set of faded and frayed flannel pajamas, neatly folded, left there. That was it. 

Briefly she flirted with the idea of leaving something behind, a note, maybe one of those drawings he always made such fun of (the jerk--what she wouldn't give to hear him making fun of such a thing now, if she were honest). Proof of her existence, now that the change she had once worked in his life was reversed. But no, that was as it should be, in her mind. She slid the door shut again, softly.

Not soft enough, it seemed. He was sitting up in his bed, some noise having startled him awake. Probably the wood-on-wood of the closet she had been too careless in closing, she scolded herself silently, holding her breath even though she didn't need to. He wouldn't hear her anyway. He glanced around the room, eyes heavy with sleep, but, seeing nothing that would catch his attention, huffed a sigh and turned over, going back to sleep, seemingly.

Rukia exhaled slowly. She should leave. That had been too close, though she couldn't explain why it felt that way. He couldn't see her, after all. After everything that had gone on, he couldn't see her and it hurt in a way she could not name. So instead of naming it, she pushed it down, squashed it with her guilt and other messy emotions she would not give a name to. "Sleep well, Ichigo."

He didn't even stir. A moment's pause threatened to tie her to the too-still scene, but she broke away, stepping quickly out through the wall, out into the dark empty sky.

Morning found her there, though. Standing on a utility pole, the tracery of cables running to and from her vantage point over the gradual spread of dawn, gray and plain and unimportant, the dew settling on the wires as the sun snuck toward rising. She was broken from her concentration on sensing out any new Hollows near her position when a door swung shut, quite near her. To her surprise, it was Ichigo, in his school uniform, reaching down to adjust his shoe, his hair a bright shock against the scenery.

He didn't look up, just walked on, slinging his school bag over his shoulder. After all, what would he see, if he looked up? Nothing besides a washed out sky and the lacework of telephone wires, such things a person saw every day.

For a moment, she was frozen in indecision. Bad ideas shouted down her better instincts though, and she followed him, high above, easily stepping from pole to pole, roof to roof, even the air around her. Here was school, his smiled greeting to Chad, Mizuiro, Tatsuki, Orihime. Orihime's soaring voice asking if it was a good idea for him to be out of the house and back in school so soon, his answer that he was fine now, after all, he'd gotten a lot of rest, hadn't he? She could hear the ring of falsehood in that, the facade of normality he was trying to rebuild. None of them looked up. Rukia was glad of it.

Even after they had gone inside and the insistent beeping of her communicator had torn her away, she had the scene in her mind, first with a sense of amazement, and then, unexpectedly, a mild shame. What right had she to watch him like this, when he couldn't see her at all? Even if she were to get a gigai, it wouldn't be right. She was hanging around like a true ghost, one he couldn't see even as he gazed idly out of the window. She had no right to haunt his life, to drain the color out of it like a streetlight on pavement.

Tearing herself away, she raced through the city, ending up at the appointed spot for the senkaimon an hour and a half early. She didn't mind. She would be back. Once she figured out a way back to him without being a ghost, once she had figured out how to get the color she had missed in his voice back into his life. After all, hadn't she promised him she'd always find a way to where he was?

For now, she stepped through into the light, vanishing from Karakura town for a good, long while.

**Author's Note:**

> A fic almost a year and a half old that, with the current arc, seems relevant again. RE-read, some minor edits here and there, etc. Inspired partly by the 29th (and second-to-last) ending theme for the Bleach anime, "Re:Pray" by Aimer. The title is part of a translation of a haiku by Bashō


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